Love’s What Vanishes: Romantic Textuality and the Making of Byron

In 1982, the winter issue of studies in romanticism announced the celebration of its majority—having turned one-and-twenty—with a series of statements by leading scholars about their memories of the field: the section, entitled “How it Was,” featured Karl Kroeber, David Perkins, Thomas McFarland, Carl Woodring, Northrop Frye, and others (yes, an all-male panel) looking at how far Romanticism had come since the dark days of mid-century, before the re-awakening that these critics had been instrumental in bringing about.¹ Immediately following those anecdotes came an essay by Jerome J. McGann entitled “Romanticism and its Ideologies,” the forerunner of his book that was about to change the field more or less permanently: The Romantic Ideology.² It was as if the journal had quietly staged a passing of the torch. McGann was then, along with Marilyn Butler, James Chandler, Jon Klancher, and Marjorie Levinson, reinventing Romantic studies via historicism.³ For McGann, the predicate of that reinvention was Byron, and the implicate historical layering of Byron’s work. Peter J. Manning could still write confidently in the pages of SiR in 1984, “Of the six major English romantic poets, Byron remains the odd man out,” but that was already changing.⁴ McGann’s essay concludes with the following sentences,

In the end Byron’s poetry discovers what all romantic poems repeatedly discover: that there is no place of refuge, not in desire, not in the mind, not in imagination. Man is in love and love’s what vanishes, and this includes—finally, tragically—even his necessary angels.⁵

The layered disillusionments of Byron’s work became in the hands of McGann tools for cracking open the self-confirming ideologies of Romanticism. It was not just Byron’s skepticism, but the involvement of his poetry with masking and unmasking, with sincere deceptions and false truths, that made him so apt a counterweight to the New-Critically sealed-and-finished version of Romanticism, which focused on the meditative “greater romantic lyrics” of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats.⁶ Even Byron’s own detachment and irony come to be revealed as illusions. “There is no place of refuge” and Romanticism will not save us: that was at the heart of the radical message that readers of Studies in Romanticism received in the historically-cold winter months of 1982.⁷

But something funny is going on in the last sentence of McGann’s article. He is borrowing from Yeats’s “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” the part in which the poet asks,

But is there any comfort to be found?Man is in love and loves what vanishes,What more is there to say?⁸

In McGann’s quotation from the poem, a Printer’s Devil has inserted an apostrophe into “loves,” so that the line has subtly shifted its meaning. “And loves what vanishes,” as Yeats wrote the phrase, conveys the idea that humans love things that are mortal and perishable, perhaps because they are so. That is, comfortlessly and tragically, we love others in their vanishing, like Orpheus reaching after the shade of Eurydice. But with that extra apostrophe—“And love’s what vanishes”—the phrase means something different, like the opposite side of the same coin: humans fall in love and then love fades. Such a rendering points to an equally tragic but chillier aspect of the human condition, and one that also spells the end of love. But in this case, it is not the perishable nature of objects of our affection, but of human love itself, which proves evanescent and impermanent in our fickle hearts.

Two pleasures for your choosing, then: Yeats’s vanishing of things and people we love, or McGann’s vanishing of our appetites and love for them. As shorthand, one could think of the first loves of young Don Juan in Cantos 1 and 2 of Byron’s epic: Donna Julia, whom Juan quickly forgets despite his beseeching and seasick farewells (love vanishes) and Haidée, doomed to die, of whom Byron’s narrator asks, “Oh, Love! what is it...